Habit Stacking: How to Use Stacked Behavioral Chains to Learn Anything, Change Your Behavior, and Get Things Done

“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than it is to think your way into a new way of acting.” — Jerry Sternin

Habits are one of the fundamental building blocks for learning, growth, and self-actualization.

A habit is a consistent and predictable behavior (or sequence of behaviors), usually occurring on a specific schedule. As humans, we use habits to convert conceptual values and ideas into actions and behaviors.

Habits like practicing, reading, writing, exercising, and others can be a powerful catalyst for achieving your personal objectives and key results. But through habit stacking, you can combine habits strategically to create a unique confluence of growth and development over time.

In this post, you’ll learn:

• What Habit Stacking is
• Why Habit Stacking matters
• How to use Habit Stacking for learning, behavior change, and productivity

What Is Habit Stacking?

Habit stacking is a method of selecting and establishing multiple habits to achieve specific, value-based outcomes.

Suppose you have a personal objective to “improve your health” and decide to create two personal key results:

1. Lose 25 pounds
2. Run three miles without stopping

As any personal trainer can tell you, there are a wide variety of habits you could establish to help you reach them.

For example, you might:

• Start cooking healthier meals at home instead of eating out
• Go to the gym every morning to run on the treadmill
• Go for an outdoor run twice per week at a local park
• Stretch daily to prevent injury and improve recovery
• And much more

Each of the above are habits you could establish to achieve your personal key results.

Simple enough.

But habit stacking is when you establish these habits simultaneously, allowing them to work in unison and achieve your key result even faster.

No matter your key result, you can use a combination of habits, each designed to achieve a particular outcome, to make progress even faster.

The Challenge of Habit Stacking

Small and easy adjustments are one of the best ways to make lasting behavior changes.

This might mean picking one value-based behavior, making it extremely easy, creating a prompt, and not changing too much all at once. Habit stacking is admittedly more difficult because it means more change more often.

But as you’ll see later in the post, there are still ways to make habit stacking accessible, no matter what kind of habits you’re trying to establish.

Why Habit Stacking Matters

The Behavioral Harmonies of Self-Actualization

“And they say in truth that a man is made of desire. As his desire is, so is his faith. As his faith is, so are his works. As his works are, so he becomes.” — The Supreme Teachings of the Upanishads

The main takeaway here is:

Habit stacking = Self-actualization.

We aren’t able to slow down or speed time up. We aren’t able to be in two places at once. We definitely can’t predict the future.

But what we can do is choose what to do next.

The quality and trajectory of your life are a function of what you choose to do next and whatever you choose to do after that. Choose and establish good habits, and your life and circumstances will reflect it.

As a human, you only get to do one thing at a time. Sure, if you were wealthy enough, you could “scale” yourself by hiring people to do things for you. But when it comes to the things that matter to you in life, no amount of wealth or workers can “overcome” your human limitation of only being able to do one thing at a time. No one can meditate for you. No one can run on the treadmill for you. Only you can do those things. And you can only do one thing at a time.

Our habits are usually related to our values (what we care most about in life). Good habits can improve our mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual lives in some way. When done consistently, we sometimes experience states of self-gratification — we might tell others about how “good” we feel having done something consistently for a period of time. Consistent, positive habits often generate a sense of accomplishment, self-satisfaction, or confidence. When life gets turbulent, it’s usually our habits that keep us afloat.

Habits also can be detrimental to what’s most important to us.

The wrong habits can hinder our ability to achieve our goals. They can erode our mental, physical, and emotional health. They can sometimes directly prevent us from moving forward with important decisions and necessary changes. The wrong habits, left unchecked, can entirely disrupt our life’s path.

Imagine your lifetime visualized as a chain with each link representing one hour. Each link can either be green or red, with green representing value-based behaviors and red representing behaviors working in opposition to what’s most important to you. Over time, as you live the hours of your life, you’re either engaged in a value-based behavior or not.

At the end of life, how might your chain look?

This is the value of your habits.

How to Use Habit Stacking

To get started with habit stacking, follow the steps below:

1. Begin With What’s Important to You

As with all behavior change, habit stacking begins with reflecting on and taking inventory of your values.

Think of your values as everything that’s important to you. When you write them down, they might be only one word (honesty), or they might be entire phrases (make my decisions through independent thinking). Whatever they are, it’s important to capture them and keep them in a place where you can constantly reference them and return to them.

Use an app like Notion or even a blank sheet of paper. Write down everything you consider most important to you in your life. There are no right or wrong answers here — these are your values. Capture as many as you can think of and in whatever words make sense to you.

2. Convert Values Into Behaviors (Habits)

As important as they are, values are really only thoughts and emotions.

Thoughts and emotions are important for creating direction and garnering motivation. But until they become behaviors, they’ll remain in your head.

If you want to actualize those values through habit stacking, you have to turn each into a behavior.

A behavior is something you do — it implies movement. Starting with your first value, imagine what it would look like while you were doing it, whatever that might be. If you wrote down that your family was important to you, how would I or someone else see that to be true? What would you be doing about it? That might include taking your family out once a week at a prescheduled time, having sit-down family dinners, or calling your family members regularly at pre-defined times.

No matter what your value is, there are a ton of behaviors you can start doing (or do more of) to actualize it.

Continue this process for every value you wrote down. For each one, challenge yourself to come up with as many habits as you can think of.

3. Choose the Most Impactful Habits

Now that you have a list of value-based habits, next need to pick the ones you’ll start out with.

The key question here is:

Which 2–3 habits (or more), if done together, would make the most positive impact in my life?

When you identify one, circle it. You should circle no more than 2–3, maybe four at most.

This is your habit stack.

These are the behaviors you’ll work on establishing simultaneously to achieve and actualize your most important values.

4. Start On “Level One”

As I’ve mentioned before, changing behavior is difficult.

If your plan is to simultaneously implement all your new habits in their most complete form right away, that’s like starting on level 10 of a video game you’ve never played. Instead, what if you started on level one?

“Starting on level one” is a concept I’ve used with clients and teams to help them understand the importance of starting out easy. When you’re just getting started with a new habit stack, you want to start with the easiest version possible. This makes the habits way easier to implement in your existing routine, helps you build momentum, and naturally allows you to “scale up” your habits over time.

Here are a few examples of “level 10” habits re-written as “level one” habits:

• Read 50 pages per day → Read five pages per day
• Meditate for 20 minutes per day → Meditate for two minutes per day
• Run for three miles three times a week → Run for five minutes twice per week
• Write three pages per day → Write one paragraph per day
• Do “phone free Sundays” with my family → Do “phone free hour” on Sundays with my family

If any of the “level one” habits seem too easy, well, that’s the point.

Level one habits should be so easy we would actually do them. The key here is if a habit isn’t happening consistently, make it easier.

5. Create a Prompt

All your habits will need some sort of “prompt” for you to do them.

A prompt is some sort of visual, auditory, or physical “cue” that reminds you it’s time to do the habit. A prompt can be anything from a mobile phone reminder to what BJ Fogg calls an “Action Prompt” (an existing habit you’re already doing that can serve as a prompt for the new behavior).

Without a clear, obvious, and specific prompt for the new habit, it likely won’t happen. One of the best ways to figure out the kind of prompt you can use is to consider your current routine. What are you already doing on a daily basis, at what times, and where?

Use (or reference) your calendar app to create a visual representation of your current weekly schedule from Sunday through Saturday. Then, find open time blocks when you might be able to do the first of your new habits. These can be at any time of day you feel is most appropriate.

Next, consider if you can start doing the new habit immediately after doing another habit or if you’ll need to establish an external prompt. The best prompts tend to be the behaviors and habits you’re already doing — for example:

• After I brush my teeth → I will write one paragraph
• After I get home from taking the kids to school → I will meditate for two minutes
• After I get into bed at night → I will read five pages of a book

Each of the formulas above uses an existing habit or behavior you can use as a “prompt” to do the new behavior. So long as you clearly establish it and make a commitment to yourself, using the behavior as a prompt should be easy. Alternatively, for situations when an action prompt wouldn’t work, just create a mobile prompt using your Reminders app, habit tracking app, or calendar app.

6. Start Habit Stacking

After you’ve selected your value-based habits you want to focus on, scaled them down to their easiest versions, figured out when you’ll do them, and picked a prompt to use for each, you’re ready to start habit stacking.

Beginning on the first day, do the easy version of your habits when your prompts emerge in your awareness. After you do your prompt behavior, do the new habit. After you see, hear, or feel the external prompt you created, do the easy version of the behavior.

That’s it.

In some cases, the easy version will still feel too difficult. This is usually the case when you find yourself saying things like, “I’m too tired,” “I’ll do it tomorrow,” or “I just don’t have the willpower.” In these cases, make the habit even easier! Even if you scale your new habit down a “touch and go” situation (opening your book and reading one page or running down the street and back) that’s where you should start.

At the beginning of a new habit-stacking routine, the goal is not to do the level 10 versions of your behaviors — it’s to reorient yourself around a new routine and ease yourself into the new habits.

7. Scale Your Habit Stack

For the first few days and weeks, focus only on executing the “level one” versions of your habits.

Again, the goal here is simply to get the new habits into your routine. Even though you may not be doing the full-on versions of your habits just yet, that’s okay.

Over time, you’ll notice that one or two or all of the habits will become too easy. This is an important point to reach. It means you’re ready to start scaling your habits to slightly longer, slightly more difficult versions. If your level one habit of meditating just two minutes a day starts to become too easy, scale up to three or four minutes. If your level one habit of running a quarter mile is becoming too easy, scale up to half a mile or .75 miles.

The key here is to naturally scale your habits up. The scaling should be so subtle you don’t feel too different. And because the habits are so deeply ingrained into your routine, it’s no longer a question of whether or not you’ll do it — it’s just a matter of making them slightly more difficult. Think of this like getting to level two.

Over time, this scaling process will continue. You’ll naturally do harder and harder versions of your behaviors until you finally reach your “level 10” versions (and beyond).

Three Ways I Can Help You Apply What You Just Learned

1. Anti-Habits are just as important as your value-based habits — Read my free in-depth guide on Anti-Values here.
2. Looking for one-on-one help with establishing your own daily architecture, routines, and habits? Book a call with me here.
3. Have a question about anything you read today? Send me a question here!